Aviatrix Classics – The Fun of It by Amelia Earhart
Aviatrix Classics – The Fun of It by Amelia Earhart
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Show notes
In this episode of Literary Aviatrix Classics with guest hosts Dr. Jacque Boyd and Capt. Jenny Beatty, we discuss The Fun of It: Random Records of My Own Flying and of Women in Aviation by Amelia Earhart. This book offers fascinating insights to where aviation was at the time the book was published and how Amelia and her contemporaries imagined aviation would impact the future. We also learn from AE’s own words about her pre-aviation life, her selection and participation in the Friendship Flight as a passenger on a transatlantic flight, and ultimately about her own solo flight across the pond. My favorite parts of the book were her summaries of women’s accomplishments and potential in aviation.
Transcript:
Liz Booker (00:48)
Jacque and Jenny, welcome.
Jenny Beatty (00:50)
Hi!
Jacque Boyd (00:50)
Hello?
Liz Booker (00:52)
Well, I’m so excited to get to this book. You know, we delayed this so that we could cover some others before Amelia, but this is super exciting. And let’s start with our impressions of this book. I’ll let you two go.
Jacque Boyd (01:08)
It had been a long time since I’d read this. It is probably, in my estimation, one of the best profiles of who Earhart really was in her own words. And the thing that reached out and smacked me was she really had a sense of humor. And I just…
Jenny Beatty (01:35)
Yeah.
Jacque Boyd (01:38)
I loved rereading it.
Jenny Beatty (01:41)
And I was just going to echo that. Yeah, I was just going to echo that as well. Echoing Jacque, if you want some insight into Amelia Earhart character and the kind of person that she is, just read this book, her own words, but it’s all there. Everything important to her in her life, it’s in this book. And we’ll get more into that as we talk about it chapter by chapter, but certainly her love of flying comes through, but also
Liz Booker (01:42)
Have a
Jenny Beatty (02:11)
explaining flying and promoting flying and promoting aviation to the public. It’s in here too.
Liz Booker (02:17)
Yeah, so that’s the thing that stood out to me that this is a beautiful snapshot of where aviation was when this book was written. And I think it’s super valuable from that regard. I’m going to be the outcast here and just say I felt like I didn’t get to know Amelia that much better through reading her own words than I had reading about her elsewhere. So I was mildly disappointed by this book.
And of course, you now my measuring stick is Louise Thaden’s book. And so everybody else has just such a hard act to follow. But I definitely see like the importance of this book in the history of aviation and where women were and her passion for that. And I know we’re going to talk about that a little bit more as we get going. So I don’t, you know, the format that we’ve used for this is to kind of talk about why the person
was important that we are bringing in, but that doesn’t feel like it really needs a lot. But Jacque, do you have anything to expound on why this book is important in our history?
Jacque Boyd (03:25)
Well, again, I think it gives, if you’ve ever listened to any recordings of Earhart, her voice is very distinctive. Her spoken voice is very distinctive. And if in the back of my mind while I was reading, I kept hearing her words in her voice.
Liz Booker (03:52)
That’s cool.
Jacque Boyd (03:53)
And it added a dimension to the personality rather than the celebrity. I think in a lot of ways we often forget that she really was a woman with failings and wonderful perspectives. And I think that’s one of the reasons this is such an important book.
Jenny Beatty (04:22)
So I was going to read a quotation from a different book that speaks to Amelia Earhart importance. And I’ll read it now because you brought this up, like why is Amelia Hart important? So I’m going to read a couple of short excerpts from the book, Still Missing.
Liz Booker (04:28)
Please.
Jenny Beatty (04:42)
Amelia Earhart and the search for modern feminism by Susan Ware and this book came out in 1993.
Liz Booker (04:50)
Okay.
Jenny Beatty (04:52)
In the end, so you need to know if you aren’t aware that Amelia Earhart was a contemporary of Charles Lindbergh and frequently compared to him because they resembled each other physically and in demeanor as well. In the end, the most succinct way to compare the two most famous aviators of the 1920s and 30s is to note the following. Both Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh flew because they loved the freedom of the skies.
and both flew to promote public acceptance of commercial aviation. But Amelia Earhart had an additional reason for flying that she did not share with Colonel Lindbergh. She flew for women. Her feminist commitment made her accept, if not embrace, the minor inconveniences of being a popular heroine. Unlike Charles Lindbergh, who saw his fame as a hindrance, Amelia Earhart saw hers
as an opportunity to do something constructive for women. After the 1928 flight, Amelia worked to portray her individual achievements as an example of women’s capabilities in the modern world and as steps forward for all women.
I’m jumping ahead slightly here to a place where she says, by her widely publicized individual accomplishments and clearly articulated feminist ideology, which we will hear in her book, Amelia Earhart demonstrated that women could be autonomous human beings, could live life on their own terms, and could overcome conventional barriers.
Liz Booker (06:32)
Which is, you know, a point that transcends aviation, right? She, yep, yeah.
Jacque Boyd (06:37)
Absolutely.
Jenny Beatty (06:38)
And that’s the importance of Amelia Earhart. I think to the
certainly to me and not just me as a woman pilot, but me as a woman. And that comes through in this book.
Liz Booker (06:51)
It does, yeah, it absolutely does. And while I find it sometimes frustrating that when you talk to the general public who has no relationship with aviation that the only female aviator they know is Amelia, well, at least they know somebody and it’s thanks to her notoriety and the fact that she was so prolific in her writing and was willing to be out in the public eye like that and take both the…
both the praise for her accomplishments and all of the criticism that went along with that too, which she kind of talks about in the book as well. Yeah. And so Jenny, you are our resident expert on publications and editions and those kinds of things. What do you have to say about the evolution of this book itself?
Jacque Boyd (07:25)
Right.
Jenny Beatty (07:38)
Well, I certainly share the title of Resident Expert with Jacque but I’ve been the designated one to talk about it in these talks. So thank you. So the fun of it was first produced in 1932. And it was Amelia Earhart second book that she authored. Her first book, I’m holding up a copy, it’s called 20 Hours and 40 Minutes, and that’s the length of time of her
Liz Booker (07:43)
Yeah.
Ehh,
Jenny Beatty (08:07)
trip as a passenger on the Friendship. We’re gonna hear more about that. And she wrote this directly after that flight. And it was when she was not known for her own pilot exploits. So that was her first book. And then The Fun of It, which we’re talking about today, which came out in 1932. So a couple things about book collecting, just very briefly, I’ve touched on it before, but I’ll talk about it here, because you’ll see the relevance in a minute.
If you want to collect books, and I’m not an expert on book collecting, but this is just kind of a few things I’ve picked up. What you might look for is a first edition first printing and a hardcover and in good condition. And believe me, expert book collectors who are professionals and know their business, they have a system of assessing a book and its condition. So from like new, fine, very fine, good, worn, and so on.
So the condition, so does it have markings? Is it beat up and stained? Are there markings inside? But the other thing that adds value to an older book is the dust cover present. This is a first edition that I’m holding up here, no dust cover. Well, it’s almost a 90 year old book and dust covers your paper. So they get ripped, torn and lost. So if you get one with a dust cover, especially this book, it adds
Liz Booker (09:24)
Right?
Jenny Beatty (09:33)
a lot of value. The third thing that adds value to a book like this is is it autographed by the author? And you’ll see a lot of variation and some authors sign many books and some authors do not. There’s a contemporary male author who writes books that are commonly found even in any bookshop and including at airports and he’s trying to reduce the value of his signature because he’s, I forget who this is, I’m sorry but I remember the story but not the name.
He surreptitiously goes into airport bookstores and autographs his own books to lower the value of resale. Because I do want to emphasize for a modern author, they only make money on a book in the first sale. The first sale that comes from a bookstore or from the publisher. They don’t make a dime when it’s resold. So he signs them to reduce that resale value. But back to this book and a book like this, an autographed book by Amelia Earhart
very much adds value to it. one more thing about this book, Jacque talked about hearing Amelia Earhart voice. So I’m holding up my copy. It is a first edition, no dust jacket and not autographed. But in the back, there’s a sleeve and there Jacque’s holding up her copy as well. And there is a record, a little vinyl record.
Liz Booker (10:49)
you
Jenny Beatty (10:56)
I’m holding it up. It’s about the size of, it’s almost exactly the size of a CD and it is vinyl. And this is a recording of her speech given after her flight in the friendship and landing in, well, Ireland and England.
Jacque Boyd (11:13)
And that is also available from audio books. You can get that one little recording.
Liz Booker (11:25)
Aha!
Jenny Beatty (11:25)
Excellent. So what makes this book valuable then would be first edition, dust jacket, record in place, autographed. There’s one more factor that can add value to a book like this, a collectible book, and that’s called a presentation copy or an association copy. So Jacque and I who’ve had a friendly competition on book collecting, we’ve been following
this exact book for 30 some years, right Jacque? And when I first looked for one that was autographed, I think it was over a thousand dollars, about $1200 And at the time that was just a fortune that I couldn’t spend on a book, okay? Later when I was, you know, an airline pilot and earning a good salary and no debt, no longer paying for flying lessons or ratings or anything, I looked again and I think by then they were about $2 ,500 and I still didn’t get one.
Jacque Boyd (11:56)
Ha ha.
Jenny Beatty (12:22)
So I’ve checked very recently, yesterday, and the most expensive copy you can find right now, which would be this book with the dust jacket in excellent condition, autographed, $12 ,500. But back to the presentation copy. I think I immediately emailed Jacque about the availability of a very special book and I suggested she buy it and I’m very disappointed she did not. Do you remember this, Jacque? Yes.
Jacque Boyd (12:48)
Yes, I do.
Jenny Beatty (12:50)
So it was a presentation copy of this book from Amelia Earhart And then it’s inscribed to her dear friend, Jacqueline Cochran. It was for sale for $25 ,000. Yeah, and it’s not available now. So somebody bought it or it’s been taken off the market. I didn’t see it. But to all of you who are disappointed in those prices, this book is available. There are many other editions, very recent editions, all sorts of editions. And I found it
Liz Booker (13:04)
Wow.
Jenny Beatty (13:20)
online for as cheap as $6 .99. And of course your library will have this book. So widely available. I do want to say one more thing about my copy that I first had for a long time, because some books are very special when they’re gifts from special people.
I’m going to tear up a little bit because this was a book my sisters gave me when I got my first airline job. So they were congratulating me on my first airline job and gave me this book in June of 1991. So not a first edition, but very special to me.
Liz Booker (13:59)
Well, that’s lovely, Jenny. And I would love to compare how it looks compared to what I was able to get off the market, which is an edition put out by the Chicago Review Press. I’m not sure what year this one was put out, but it’s okay. I mean, in terms of like the interior, it’s not that great.
Jacque Boyd (14:15)
Right.
Jenny Beatty (14:24)
You know what else say about this one that may be true for you as well? It looks like a complete duplication of the original book. It wasn’t, in other words, reset, retypeset. It’s the original typeset with all the errors and yeah. Which makes it, gives it that ear of.
Liz Booker (14:36)
Right, it was like photocopied. Right?
Jacque Boyd (14:39)
Right. And one of the things that I found about different editions, because the first one that I got is a 1944 wartime reprint. And the thing that was left off of it was the secondary title that says
random records of my own flying and women in aviation. And this 1944 edition never has that in print.
Liz Booker (15:23)
That’s the same with my, wait, actually no, on the title page we do get to that, not on the cover. But honestly, like I feel like that description, it perfectly tells you what the book is like. Because it does feel somewhat random at some times, like, because she just kind of hops around from topic to topic, which is one of my criticisms in terms of the art of this book.
Jacque Boyd (15:29)
Right.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Right.
Jenny Beatty (15:49)
say though that the title, The Fun of It, spot on. I think that was very deliberate because not only does she talk about how she’s doing it for the fun of it, that’s what’s implied. I’m flying for the fun of it, but she’s promoting aviation to others for the fun of it. So I thought it was a good title that conveyed the message she’s trying to give.
Liz Booker (16:06)
Absolutely. Yep. Absolutely.
Jacque Boyd (16:09)
Right.
Liz Booker (16:14)
I agree. And it is a great sales pitch for it, for sure. So if we’re ready to get into it, let’s do it. So I don’t feel like, in our last conversation about Neta Snook’s memoir, I taught Amelia to fly, that’s a book that’s out of print, so people can’t get it. So we did go like really in depth with every chapter summary. I think here we can probably gloss over it because you can all get the book yourselves.
but it’s not gonna spoil anything. There’s no information in here that you probably haven’t read somewhere else about her if you’ve followed anything about Amelia Earhart. And it’s not like a story with a plot and there are twists that you’re gonna, now we’re spoiling it for you. So I think it’s okay for us to go ahead and summarize the book.
Jacque Boyd (16:58)
Right.
Jenny Beatty (17:03)
And in fact, are a couple things where junctures were like, interesting. She skipped over this and didn’t mention this. So I’ll bring that up a couple times.
Liz Booker (17:09)
Right? I agree. I agree. I agree. Same. Okay, so I think we’re starting this time with Jacque, and you’re gonna hit the first couple of chapters for us.
Jacque Boyd (17:12)
Absolutely.
Right. The first chapter is titled Growing Up Here and There. And the second chapter is Aviation and I Get Together. And they both kind of blend into each other. So I’m going to go through both of those. But Liz, I think you are spot on with your comment about the random and the rambling. There was so much.
in the beginning period of her life that we had stories that just bounced all over. But in the first chapter there was a real theme that was going on with girls when she opens and says, and of course you were mechanical when you were a girl, is what the response is
And I think we all can relate to that. you must have loved to use tools and whatever if you were interested in aviation. And the constant theme of her parents and allowing, I don’t like the word, but they allowed.
her and her sister Muriel to do things that were typically boy things. The asking for footballs for Christmas and the fact that they were some of the first little girls in Atchison to wear gym suits, the bloomers and things like that. There was a constant
testing of the boundaries, but the boundaries weren’t there for her from her parents, maybe from her grandparents. But it just, it seemed like all the opportunities that came up, there was never a boundary as to whether it was a girl or a boy. And that kind of theme permeates
Liz Booker (19:42)
Mm -hmm.
Jacque Boyd (19:48)
the whole book. So it was fascinating for me to see
The fact that she loved books. I, of course, I love that. And so there’s this theme of who she is, what kind of situation she had growing up in a small Midwestern town. I know that one. And it just, was fascinating in that regard.
Liz Booker (20:00)
Yes, of course.
Yeah.
Jenny Beatty (20:05)
you
Liz Booker (20:25)
To a point that Jenny made in a different conversation that we had about, I think probably in our intro of you guys, just thinking about what are the things that give young women the confidence to enter into a world like this. We talked about with Neta Snook that she did have some of that mechanical background in her childhood and had kind of that creativity.
in the workshop so that she had some exposure. But the theme that Amelia keeps hitting is sports. And the fact that girls need to be able to play sports because that’s going to give them all kinds of confidence and it’s just a healthy thing.
Jenny Beatty (21:13)
what she omitted, there’s a slight mention or maybe later in the book that she attended six high schools. She was born and spent a lot of time at her grandparents in Atchison, Kansas, but they, with her family, lived in a number of different cities around the Midwest. And the part that’s left out, well, what is included is a deep love for her parents, including her father, but…
What’s omitted is that he, in other books, you’ll find out that he was an alcoholic and that is what caused a number of issues in the family, including the moving around because he lost work. He’d find a job and lost work. And also, I just want to ask Jacque, if you were going to touch on how he was a railroad man and the effect that this had on Amelia and you.
Jacque Boyd (22:00)
Yes, yes. And that being, my dad was a switchman for the Union Pacific. And all of our vacations, we traveled as railroad non -REVs. And so being able to travel that way and assuming that was the same situation with her dad, that added to her travels a lot.
Jenny Beatty (22:30)
Yeah, she mentions that, that it is.
Jacque Boyd (22:32)
But one thing that, and I kept looking for it when she was talking about starting her flying lessons, thinking back to Neta Snook’s book.
She was not mentioned at that first flight. There was nothing about it until page 88. And it said, finally we landed. And she, for my primary work, was with a woman, talked with me some more. I was, I was,
Jenny Beatty (22:55)
I noticed that as well.
Jacque Boyd (23:17)
kind of taken aback by the anonymity and the offhandedness of, and maybe it’s a good thing that she didn’t think having a woman instructor was out of the ordinary. I don’t know, but that one I filed away.
Jenny Beatty (23:41)
I found that interesting as well, notable. made a note of it. And also it was notable because as we’ll see when we get deeper into the book, Amelia makes a real point of highlighting and discussing at length other women pilots who are doing amazing things. Doesn’t mention Neta Snook, her instructor. Now that we can only speculate, but of course we do know from having read and discussed Neta’s book very recently, Neta
married and stopped all flying. And that may be part of why Amelia omitted her, but I found that notable as well.
Jacque Boyd (24:18)
Yeah, I was surprised.
Liz Booker (24:21)
Well, that leads us to chapter three, because that’s absolutely, yeah.
Jenny Beatty (24:24)
Can I read one quote from this chapter that I felt was very, really leapt out at me? So this is from chapter two, it’s on page 25 of the edition I have. So this is her quote from the book. As soon as we left the ground, this was on her first flight, sorry, this is on her first flight ever as a passenger. As soon as we left the ground, I knew I myself had to fly.
I think I’d like to fly, I told my family casually that evening, knowing full well I’d die if I didn’t.
Liz Booker (25:02)
Yeah. Yeah, and then they kind of, they kind of like, are like, sure, you can do that until she shows that she’s serious. And they’re like, she really wants to this.
Jenny Beatty (25:04)
I think a lot of pilots can relate to that.
But to write that down, those words, I’d die if I didn’t. That’s how serious she was, even if she didn’t admit to it.
Liz Booker (25:16)
Yeah. Yeah.
That’s so true. And so one of the other things that this whole railroad theme comes back later, just talking about how the railroad was the primary mode of long distance transportation and her predictions. I mean, it was already happening at the time of the writing of the book, but her predictions for what mass transit would look like later in the aviation world. So that was really interesting as well.
Jenny Beatty (25:48)
do have one other quote I wanted to highlight from this chapter because she talks, again, part of the book as we see later, she is promoting aviation and encouraging young people to fly. And so there’s a really early quote here that talks about how you can support somebody. So this quote is,
from the time when Amelia was taking flying lessons and it really speaks to a way that a student pilot can be supported, which she talks more about later in the book, but this was really illustrative of this. And she refers to her mother. She says, if mother was worried during this period, she did not show it. Possibly, except for backing me financially, she could have done nothing more helpful. I didn’t realize it at the time.
but the cooperation of one’s family and close friends is one of the greatest safety factors a fledgling flyer can have. And that all of us who are pilots, I think can agree the support of our friends and family in our desire to learn to fly is pivotal, it’s key. And I was so glad to see Amelia refer to that and that she got that from her family.
Liz Booker (26:56)
Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, so the chapter three is this is our first glimpse of basically an information pamphlet. It’s it’s what does it look like? And I the name of the chapter is when you learn to fly. And I liked the the choice of words there. It wasn’t about her. She is trying to educate and maybe an uninitiated and uninitiated public.
most of whom have never even been in a plane themselves. And so it’s all about what does it mean to fly, whether you’re as a passenger or becoming a pilot. She goes through kind of like the basics of aerodynamics and how a plane works and what training pilots go through to become qualified in their aircraft.
and those kinds of things, which make it a really interesting chapter historically to kind of see where we were with the development of aviation, what people understood about aerodynamics and those kinds of things, and also how rapidly things were changing. I think, I don’t know if it was in this chapter or the next one where she actually talks about how quickly just transatlantic flight was evolving because we went from
Jacque Boyd (28:04)
Yes.
Liz Booker (28:16)
her getting to do this as a passenger and that being a record making flight to now they’ve had over 36 transatlantic crossings and it just keeps building on it to the point that it’s no longer news when somebody crosses the Atlantic, right? So that was interesting. And then you kind of my thunder on the whole Neta Nook thing. I was completely surprised. mean, and that’s one of the things that I’m, you know, Amelia probably had.
just hundreds of meaningful relationships in her life and couldn’t possibly do them all justice. This is, by the way, a very short read. It’s only 200 pages. So of course she couldn’t cover all of those relationships and their importance. But the fact that she does name drop so many pioneering women and does not mention Neta’s name, I was kind of like, what’s going on there? Because we got a very sort of intimate
Jacque Boyd (29:08)
Yeah.
Liz Booker (29:12)
glimpse into their friendship or what at least Neta seemed to take away as a close friendship. And then just kind of like barely even a mention in here. So I thought that was interesting. Is there anything that you guys wanted to highlight about these descriptions of flying from this chapter? Jenny, I see you nodding your head. What do have to say?
Jenny Beatty (29:33)
Yeah, what struck me about her describing flight, describing how airplanes fly, what it feels like to be in the air, what it looks like, all the sensations of flight. What struck me is how she worked really hard to compare all those feelings and sensations to things that people can relate to. as describing stunting compares it to weaving.
through traffic in a car. She talks about the sensation of riding like on a yacht or a
even how to operate the controls, how it’s different from steering a wagon. So she tried to really make it relatable to people to something that related it to something they would understand.
Liz Booker (30:14)
Yeah.
Exactly. Jacque, how about you? Anything?
Jacque Boyd (30:26)
I think the explanations were interesting and there was an attitude where projecting that this was just going to become normal. It was going to affect everyone and it was sort of like get on board because this is the way it’s going to be. I loved that.
kind of approach to the information that she put out in those chapters.
Liz Booker (30:56)
Yeah, yeah, and she does that even more as we move on in the book. But it is just, this whole chapter is basically trying to educate the public on what flying is and what it feels like and what to expect. And then in the next chapter is called Joy Hopping and Other Things. And here we pop around a little bit, it’s 1922. She…
Jacque Boyd (31:01)
Right.
Liz Booker (31:23)
doesn’t really explain why she says her father’s health had begun to be impaired. But that’s as much detail as we get on that topic. She takes some photography courses, but then she and her mom hop in a car. In her car, her canary yellow, it’s a roadster, I think was what it was. And it’s very famous and they drive across the country and we get some of that.
One of the things that I noted is that her sister also headed east, but she took a train to get there in time to start classes at Harvard, which is impressive because these are early days for women in degrees at Harvard. I think 1920 was the first open degree program. So I kind of want to know more about her sister from
And then we get into like her time at the Denison house in Boston, which is very interesting and ties into a recent cozy mystery that came out about her, a case for the girls. I interviewed the author for that. Edith Maxwell wrote this book and it’s about Amelia. It’s like a mystery around Amelia and this.
sort of halfway house that she’s working in and how she supports that. that was interesting knowing the backstory for this novel that recently came out to actually read her experience working there. But then also kind of what she was doing on the side, staying in touch with the aviation community. She wasn’t necessarily flying a whole lot, but she stayed in touch and that opened the door for this opportunity for her to go on this friendship flight. so toward the end, yes ma ‘am, go.
Jenny Beatty (33:08)
So can I just interrupt to just mention a couple things about that little section that she kind of jumps over. What she neglected to say, which we know from other sources, is that part of why her mother and her sister all left Los Angeles to go back to the East Coast is her parents got divorced in 1924. And not in this book.
Liz Booker (33:14)
Yeah.
thank you.
Jenny Beatty (33:35)
Okay, and of course it was due to all the issues that the family had because of his alcoholism. The other thing, and again, maybe some other authors have put this together. she was motivated to go work at Denison House, obviously for many reasons. But one of the things that happened effectively when she did that is it ended a relationship and engagement that she had with a man named Sam Chapman.
Liz Booker (33:40)
Yeah.
Jenny Beatty (34:01)
and they’d been in a sort of a relationship for about four years. But by going and working for Denison House, she was pretty much deliberately saying, yep, I’m not gonna get married and settle down right now. And broke it off with him.
Liz Booker (34:14)
Interesting. this is where I’m disappointed. Yeah, this is where I’m disappointed in this book is because we don’t get any juicy bits about her personal life.
Jenny Beatty (34:16)
And it’s not in the book. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely omitted, yeah.
Jacque Boyd (34:26)
Right, right. And she only mentions Putnam twice and in a very offhand way. I agree, there were some lapses that if you knew what was going on, and you’re right Liz, it’s a short book, so she couldn’t hit everything.
Jenny Beatty (34:32)
Yeah.
Liz Booker (34:32)
Interesting.
Huh.
Right.
And that wasn’t her purpose in this book, clearly. Yeah, but.
Jacque Boyd (34:54)
Right.
Jenny Beatty (34:56)
Well, and I think it’s more than that. isn’t just, it’s true. She had a purpose with this book that I think she did achieve. And part of that purpose, it wasn’t to tell her life story. It wasn’t to glorify herself. We’re gonna see that and I’m gonna mention it later. But also, I think she’s just a very private person. And of course, who wants to advertise that your father’s an alcoholic or that your parents are divorced in 1924? You don’t wanna, you know, so.
Jacque Boyd (35:08)
Right.
Look at the time frame that she wrote this in. It’s one of those times when people did not regurgitate their life. And so the personal things are different. But those things struck me even for the time about who wasn’t mentioned. But yet the book could also be a wonderful
Liz Booker (35:30)
Yeah.
Jacque Boyd (35:50)
resource for women of the time went in latter parts of the book. The detail and the perceptions are stunning.
Jenny Beatty (36:03)
Well, she spends more time talking about what some of these women pilots wear than on her own life. The clothes.
Jacque Boyd (36:10)
the clothes aspect permeated.
Liz Booker (36:14)
You know, I was going to bring this up earlier when you were talking about her and the gym clothes, like she goes on and on about attire and how the clothing, it’s almost as if it is a curated, very like, like in the last book when we talked about the leather jacket that she had put on and then it wasn’t rough enough. So she went and slept in it. It was like, how about now? Like,
she was very curated in her physical appearance to convey, you know, not only that she was feminine, because she definitely still looked feminine, even though she was wearing what would have been considered men’s clothes at the time, but also like a confidence and a freedom. There definitely was a sense of freedom about clothing that she goes on and on about.
Jenny Beatty (37:06)
So if you don’t mind my taking this moment to show some pictures to those who are watching this on video can see the pictures I hope. I have a collection of pictures of Amelia Earhart in a variety of outfits. so my contribution to this is I have a feeling she wrote about all the women’s attire. She doesn’t talk about her own attire very much, a little bit, but a lot about the other women. I think it’s because that’s what people wanted to know. And I especially, I think the women.
she was speaking to her female audience by talking about clothing. That’s what I think. I don’t think it’s necessarily her own obsession. I think it’s giving her audience what she thinks they want. Yes. But so this is from a 1935 Cosmopolitan magazine that I’m going to talk about again in a minute, but there are six photos in this spread.
Liz Booker (37:41)
I see.
public. Yeah.
Jenny Beatty (37:58)
She’s in a 1920s flapper dress, like for dress up. Another portrait where she’s wearing a button down, like men’s style shirt with a tie. Then there she is in her famous leather flying jacket, flying helmet boots. She’s in a tennis outfit, which is with a skirt and then a different flying outfit. And then in a jodhpurs, another type of flying outfit, again with those shirt and men’s tie.
Liz Booker (38:24)
That’s so cool.
Jenny Beatty (38:27)
and all in one spread. So again, I think this is about let’s give the audience what they want to see. And of course, this is for cosmopolitans, so especially for a women’s audience. And I’m going to come back to that magazine later. Yeah.
Liz Booker (38:38)
Yeah, that’s funny.
Well, our next chapter gets into this in more detail and Jenny, it’s your chapter, Across the Atlantic with the Friendship, but we start to hear a little bit about the preparations for this flight. First of all, how she was invited to be on it. Her not huge enthusiasm about sort of just being a passenger. She kind of wanted to be able to fly as well. Things didn’t work out because of the weather there. And then also this mention of how like, how much the
Jacque Boyd (38:43)
Thank
Liz Booker (39:12)
pilots and the mechanic were getting paid and that she not only was she not going to get paid for this stunt, but she also was like expected to write about it and was not compensated for even for the writing, which is kind of like crappy, but she still seems to go into the thing with with enthusiasm and excited about it. So I’ll let you take it over from there, Jenny.
Jacque Boyd (39:29)
Right.
Jenny Beatty (39:39)
chapter five is crossing the Atlantic with the Friendship and the Friendship, that’s the name of the aircraft, which is a Fokker three engine aircraft that was especially equipped with floats
to be a float plane or seaplane in order to make this crossing. so some of the details about it were in the prior chapter, you didn’t really go over it much, Liz, but she was interviewed at length to see if she was suitable to be the woman to be on this flight.
Jacque Boyd (40:11)
I would have loved to have known who else was interviewed.
Liz Booker (40:17)
I know, right?
Jenny Beatty (40:17)
Yeah. And also some background, which she does give in the book is that the backer of the flight, the sponsor, and originally, who was going to be the woman on this flight is Miss the honorable Mrs. Frederick Guest of London, who is the former Amy Phipps of Pittsburgh. So she bought the airplane and was the major sponsor. And she’s the one who said, I want it to be an American girl.
who is the first to cross the Atlantic by airplane. so I think it’s, I’m pretty sure that she was part of in selecting Amelia Earhart. Now, they interviewed Amelia in large part because she was a licensed pilot at the time. she talks quite a bit about the preparation.
and training for the crew about the aircraft, the engines, a lot of details. And it was all shrouded in secrecy. They were kind of pretending that the airplane was being prepared for Admiral Byrd for an exploration of the South Pole. So that was kind of the cover story. And even her own family did not know she was scheduled to go on this flight. And she herself never went to Boston Airport, even though she was right there in Boston.
to be with the men because they were all afraid of any premature publicity. The Friendship, so the Friendship is the name of the ship. It was only the eighth crossing total of the North Atlantic. And when they did it, and it was three of them on board, including a highly experienced pilot and highly experienced mechanic, and Amelia, the total number of passengers who crossed the Atlantic when they completed this flight,
was 30, I should say by airplane, not by lighter than air aircraft such as dirgibles. So this was very early in this type of aviation exploit. And she doesn’t talk about it in the book, but it’s known from other writings about her. know, airplanes were lost doing all sorts of things like this. And she wrote what she called popping off letters.
which were basically goodbye letters to her loved ones in case she died in these attempts. So for her family, she did write popping off letters before doing this flight. They made three attempts before it successfully launched and she had hoped, and I guess was led to believe that she might be able to do some of the flying, but as she notes in the book, all but two hours of the flight were in.
was blind flying or in the clouds, what we call instrument flying. She had zero training in instrument flying, so she did not fly at all. She was only a passenger. She describes in detail what they had available to eat and drink and what they actually ate and drank. She describes what it’s like being inside clouds, how it’s a clammy gray wetness.
Some of what she wrote about, I want to quote from the book because these are things that she pulled from the aircraft log. So it sounds like one of her jobs was to keep a log. So apparently these are quotes from the log book.
Jacque Boyd (43:31)
Mm
Jenny Beatty (43:38)
I do believe we are getting out of the fog. Marvelous shapes in white stand out, some trailing shimmering veils. The clouds look like icebergs in the distance. It seems almost impossible that one couldn’t bounce forever on the packed fog we are leaving. The highest peaks of the fog mountains are tinted pink with the setting sun. The hollows are gray and shadowy. And then another entry. We are running between the clouds still but they’re coming together.
How gray it is before and behind the mass of soggy cloud we came through is pink with dawn. Dawn, the rosy fingered as the Odyssey has it. Himal, the sea, we’re at 3 ,000 feet, patchy clouds. We’ve been jazzing from 1 ,000 to 5 ,000 where we are now to get out of the clouds. At present, there are sites of blue and sunshine, but everlasting clouds always in the offing.
And she goes on with a little bit more. So you can see a lot of clouds, but she’s very observant and poetic in describing it. I want to also say that there’s just a little aside, but in light of what happened to Amelia later, they actually left behind lifesavers, life vests, and a rubber boat left behind on this flight to save weight.
However, this was a seaplane. Luckily, they didn’t need to ditch at sea and so on. But she talks about what different air pressure feels like. She talks about how they tried to make contact with the ship. Anyway, a lot of really interesting details about the flight and what her whole experience was. they landed in Point Berry,
whales, not quite where they intended to, but where they were able to set down close to shore in a safe place. Although it took several hours for them to attract enough attention to have the local people send a boat out to retrieve them. And then of course they were mobbed and she was able to meet Mrs. Guest, the sponsor in Southampton. Another quote.
More than ever then did I realize how essentially this was a feminine expedition originated and financed by a woman whose wish was to emphasize what her sex stood ready to do.
She says another quote, I feel in the future as women become better able to pull their own weight in all kinds of expeditions, the fact of their sex will loom less large when credit is given for accomplishment. She’s misquoted in papers, but she ends up buying an airplane. We find out from a different source. found out actually George Palmer Putnam, who was a promoter at that time, bought an airplane for her from Lady Mary Heath.
there in England and it was sent back to the United States for her and she flew it to California. She says now a vagabond, which leads to the next chapter. But I’ll pause here in case either of have anything you want to say about that, this chapter about the flight on the friendship.
Liz Booker (46:34)
No, I liked the quote that you read. kind of had that page up and ready to go. And in between the two things that you read about, you know, this being a feminine expedition in that in the future, would be no big deal. She is lamenting the fact that, you know, all of the attention was on her, even though she had very little to do with actually the actual execution of the mission. And so she says as as this is, you know, though palpably unfair, the circumstance was unavoidable. So
You know, I feel like nobody who’s a pilot would want to have like ridiculous publicity, you know, over being a passenger in a plane like now or then. So you could kind of get that discomfort that she’s experiencing serving in this public affairs role when she’s actually a pilot and can do this, maybe not in instrument conditions yet, but it’s just an awkward spot for her to be in.
Jacque Boyd (47:22)
Yeah.
Jenny Beatty (47:33)
Yeah, and I think that does come across where she felt a lot of discomfort because she felt like she didn’t deserve this glory, even though part of the whole point was to have a woman cross the Atlantic, but she hadn’t done, yeah, like you say, she hadn’t done the amazing flying that made that, you know, made the flight.
Jacque Boyd (47:52)
But yet, I think some of the tone with what she wrote in this chapter, she realizes that the publicity is unfair, to use an easy term, but she sees what she can do with that exposure. And I liked that approach.
that she had.
Liz Booker (48:23)
Yeah, she didn’t shy away from the spotlight, even though it was awkward. She did her best with it and used it to promote aviation. Yep. Yeah.
Jacque Boyd (48:29)
Right.
Jenny Beatty (48:31)
Certainly saw the potential. So the next chapter is called Vagabonding. So she got this little avion that she had bought from Lady Mary Heath and flew it. She just says on a lark, flew it all the way across the country. She said it was a vacation after, well, this is after having done a whole lot of publicity tours. I’m sorry. So I neglected that part. She and the other two crew members,
did a lot of publicity tours that was required of them. And then she calls this her little vacation where she flew across the country. She went to Pittsburgh, Dayton, Terre Haute, Indiana, St. Louis, Muskogee, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Pecos, Texas, has a really funny story about landing on a main street in a little town in Texas.
and another lengthy description of a flight where she gets lost and talks about aerial navigation and dead reckoning and maps and how that’s used. And some of these adventures. it’s a really nice chapter to hear about where she actually is talking about flying and some flying adventures. The thing that…
Jacque Boyd (49:42)
The thing that hit me about this chapter and considering the book is dedicated to the 99s and she was one of the first in the organization when she talks about
Liz Booker (49:45)
You
Jacque Boyd (50:03)
Having cities and towns and airports paint their name on hangars or on highways so that there’s a way to find out where you are. And my first solo, God Love a Football Stadium scoreboard so I could figure out where I was. But the 99s.
were the first group that really took ownership of air marking. And if you’ve never been on top of a hangar painting the name of the airport, it was an experience. So that one jumped out at me. It was wonderful.
Jenny Beatty (50:54)
Definitely. And just again, she’s sort of using the book to explicate a lot of different things about aviation to the public that doesn’t know these things. And she goes into some length about aircraft registration and the different types of registration numbers and the way they’re painted and so on. But I do have another
Just to another quote about the flying where she, to give you an idea of the kind of writing. So this is on this cross -country adventure. Then once more, the billowing brown areas of the Southwest stretched out before me. Ocean flying is no more lonely than that over uncharted or uninhabited land. I was told that in about 100 miles in a somewhat Southwesternly direction, there would be either a river with a railroad to the right,
or a railroad mainline with a highway on the left, depending on whether I was more west than south and vice versa. You remember in your automobile touring the hazy rural directions sometimes given to you? About three or four miles down the road, turn to your left by an old barn, then across the creek. Well, at least in such cases, you have a road to follow. In this part of the west, the rivers wiggle, cutting across country tortuously. I remember late that morning,
When I came to a friendly railroad, I experienced much the feeling as did the friendship crew in sighting land at the end of the transatlantic flight. As I prepared to land at Pecos, I recalled the uncertainty of the repaired tire and sat down gingerly. The tire was actually flat, but the light ship gave it no trouble. So just to give you an idea of some of the ruggedness, and I want to talk about what she left out. Again, I read it from a different source.
she actually then later flew her plane back to the East Coast. This was the first time a woman had flown all the way across the continent.
That’s, yep. And she did it in, I believe it’s 1928. Yep.
Liz Booker (52:50)
Really?
huh.
Jenny Beatty (52:58)
Yep. But this but I mentioned this. And so now I have to mention the following. Again, Amelia Earhart downplays some of her own achievements. And you will see this come up again in the book, even though she’s very accomplished as a pilot coming forward. She talks more about the accomplishments of other people. So part of the book and her again about how her personality comes out in this book.
Liz Booker (53:21)
It’s true.
Jenny Beatty (53:27)
is there’s some discomfort about self -promotion.
Liz Booker (53:31)
Yeah, yeah,
Jenny Beatty (53:32)
The other thing is this is the beginning of her really honing her skill as a pilot. You know, you and an airplane and the entire nation to cross, that’s one way to hone your skills. Yeah. So am I in the next chapter or someone else?
Jacque Boyd (53:40)
truth.
Liz Booker (53:45)
For sure.
Now that would be Jacque.
Jacque Boyd (53:53)
The chapter is called What to Do Next, and it is a new step into her coming of age in the aviation world and where she thinks it’s going to go. She did a lot of speaking.
And in this chapter she talks about working with women’s groups and the Department of Commerce, boys and girls groups, and it’s very evenly divided. She doesn’t necessarily just hone in on the girls. It’s always girls and boys, although she points out
again with some of the opportunities that girls don’t have, but they should have. And it’s, it’s a, she talks about the letters that she got asking, asking those silly questions, but it was very much what the population wanted to see. And one of the things that,
that really was a fun attention getter. And I’m looking for it. The list of don’ts of aviation, they are wonderfully hysterical. And it shows her sense of humor with a lot of this and taking the silly ridiculous questions.
Jenny Beatty (55:22)
page 100.
Jacque Boyd (55:43)
and just rolling with it. And a lot of them apply now. Don’t issue edicts against flying until you know something about it from experience.
Liz Booker (55:51)
Yeah.
Jenny Beatty (55:51)
Well, that’s what –
Liz Booker (56:00)
That’s a good one, yep.
Jacque Boyd (56:02)
They’re wonderful.
Jenny Beatty (56:02)
read that list of don’ts. And just so you know, I’m in a Facebook group called Raising Aviation Teens, where every day a new parent shows up in that group and says, my teen is 13 or 15. they want to fly, they’re dead set on being a pilot. And I don’t know the first thing about aviation. I mean, every day.
Liz Booker (56:12)
Yep, I’m in there. Yep.
Jenny Beatty (56:29)
And so there are others like you, Liz and me and others who are veterans pilots and are able to advise these parents. And what struck me about this list, it goes on quite a bit, these lists of don’ts, they are a hundred percent applicable today. That’s what struck me about that list. Like that’s a list I want to post in that group. Because it’s kind of written to the parents, you know, don’t just send your kid off to fly with some rickety airplane.
Jacque Boyd (56:44)
Absolutely.
Liz Booker (56:49)
You should! Yeah.
Jacque Boyd (56:54)
The one that says don’t try to tell the instructor how to do the training. Love it.
Liz Booker (56:59)
Right?
Jenny Beatty (57:01)
Say it again, because I talked over you, Jacque.
Liz Booker (57:04)
She said, don’t try to tell the instructor how to do the training. Yeah.
Jenny Beatty (57:07)
Yeah. And the other one was don’t get just get into some rickety airplane with an airplane that you don’t know about or the pilot you don’t know about, you know, things like that. And also just another quick aside, how did she get all these letters and begin writing about all this? she got an offer to be the aviation editor of Cosmopolitan magazine.
Liz Booker (57:13)
Yeah.
Jacque Boyd (57:14)
Right.
Jenny Beatty (57:32)
The quote I have is that, deciding to accept this offer, I knew that I was casting my lot permanently with aviation. Well, you, Jacque, and also now Liz, you are my enablers because I looked for and ordered that inaugural issue.
the inaugural issue of her as aviation editor November 1928. And here on the cover, beginning in this issue, Amelia Earhart will tell you all you want to know about flying. And then I earlier showed you the pictures of her in six different outfits, yeah.
Liz Booker (58:13)
Yeah, that’s true.
Jacque Boyd (58:14)
You can find a lot of reprints of her articles and they are always.
really down the middle with, again, boys and girls, even though she’s writing for a women’s publication, the writing is striking. And, you know, you’ll always wonder what the editor has to do with how the outcome of the article is. But her personality, her stance on life, her
stance on aviation. Just come shining through in a lot of those.
One of the things about this first chapter when she talks about girls and boys and education and she, the women and men who are shaping the women and men of tomorrow give me a special urge to make at least one compulsory flight for all pedagogues. So there it’s, it’s.
Every teacher ought to have a flight. That kind of attitude, her foresight in that, in this chapter, got my attention.
And the last, before we go on to the next chapter, the thing that I found wonderful is the last paragraph and she talks about language changing. And it’s that what’s coming and we can’t avoid it. So like get on board because all the terms that she used about
railroads and automobiles, aviation is going to permeate our language. I thought it was just a fascinating bit of where she is and where she thinks we’re going.
Liz Booker (1:00:23)
Yeah, it’s kind of, it’s fun to kind of track this history or see how other modes of transportation and other, you know, subcultures kind of creep into aviation in the early days. Things, you know, references to horses and stables and…
in grooming aircraft like you would groom a horse for a race like those kinds of things and then lots of nautical terms come in but I think it’s cute that the last sentence of this chapter says and conversely certain landlubber words of now may be seldom heard in the future because we’re all going to be airborne.
Jacque Boyd (1:01:03)
Well, the next chapter is called Aviation As It Is. And this one went so far beyond thinking about where we are now, where they were then, and even if it was a developing atmosphere, a lot of discussion about airlines.
Liz Booker (1:01:30)
Hmm?
Jacque Boyd (1:01:31)
passenger travel and she met, she was to, as it she was to join one of the pioneer passenger lines, Transcontinental Air Transport. And meeting the people that she did, Jane Vidal and Paul Collins, in that talking about their involvement.
in that development of passenger lines and scheduled air, it was, listening to what she had to say in the 30s about where this was going, it’s almost like a prediction of the future.
And the similarities of what she brought up then with the similarities of what airlines cope with now, the guy who tried to bring on 13 pieces of luggage and didn’t understand why he couldn’t, and all those sorts of things, and the fact that sometimes they oversold seats.
Liz Booker (1:02:53)
Hahaha
Jacque Boyd (1:02:56)
It was a fun chapter and like I said, very much a precursor to the future.
Liz Booker (1:03:04)
was and Jenny, you have anything to add to that? No. Okay, so the next chapter I am gonna very briefly gloss over because it’s so funny. again, like I don’t really understand the construction of this book. It is very random. But next we meet Doc Kimball who apparently is the meteorologist.
for trans -continental or trans -Atlantic, excuse me, flying. And he’s very interested to know what actual conditions she met because their weather reporting is so scattered and nascent at this point. And yeah, and so this whole chapter is really about weather and how they got their reports then, gaps in their reporting, the need for more ship
you know, at sea reporting so they could develop better pictures, kind of where, how everything feeds in. You know, it kind of read like, you know, whatever chapter it is in the AIM manual from my perspective. Like, okay, thanks for the education on the weather and how we do that. Cool. But she does, then she transitions into her feminist stance on, but women should be reporting the weather and.
They are perfectly capable. And so like she’s now selling this as a potential career for women to participate in, which is great, you know, and she highlights somebody who does it. unless you guys have anything to add on this chapter about weather reporting, the next chapter is really fun for me as a helicopter pilot, of course, because it’s called, was it called experimenting again? Yeah, experimenting again.
And it’s an entire chapter dedicated to the auto gyro, which was fun from a helicopter pilot’s perspective. she, she goes for a lesson. has, she goes up for like one flight. And then the guy’s like, here, take it for a spin. Remember everything I taught you. She was like, I don’t remember anything you said. And so she flies it. She then does this sort of commercial cross country.
It’s like an advertising flight, but she claims it’s also for her own sort of research to figure out what the use is for this kind of an aircraft. And then she gets into these fun, fun like spitballing predictions about what on earth a hovering craft could be good for later on, you know? And she doesn’t even imagine things like search and rescue and hovering and hoisting people and those kinds of things, which were how I used the aircraft in my career.
But that was kind of fun. Go ahead. Yeah.
Jenny Beatty (1:05:52)
Can you Can I interrupt and ask you to describe a little bit about for the audience that’s going to be watching this a little bit about the difference between an auto gyro and a helicopter and how it kind of predated the helicopter
Liz Booker (1:06:06)
Okay, no, you can’t ask me that because I completely like didn’t even look at a picture of what this thing looked like. Does it have a tail rotor? Like, let me see. Auto gyro.
Jenny Beatty (1:06:14)
Okay.
No, so I don’t know a lot about the aerodynamics of an autogyro either, except that it typically, as I understand it, it’s like an airplane in that it has an engine with a propeller on the front, like most airplanes, and wings, like most airplanes. But in addition, it has a rotor on top. So it’s kind of a hybrid with both.
and it takes off by moving forward, similar to an airplane, but once it’s airborne, then the gyro part begins to spin. think, again, I’m not an expert on these by any means, but I believe it is a precursor to helicopters, which were really not developed further until a little bit later in the 30s.
Jacque Boyd (1:07:11)
And I’m not sure from the picture of the beech nut, there is a tail, but I don’t see wings.
Liz Booker (1:07:19)
Yeah.
Jenny Beatty (1:07:20)
I don’t think it has a tail rotor.
Yeah, if you look into it, Liz later or want to throw a picture up into this later, you’ll see it has wings and a tail like an airplane tail. does not have an, I don’t think it has.
Liz Booker (1:07:32)
Yeah, it does. It has wings like an airplane. So I feel like I didn’t study for this flight.
Jacque Boyd (1:07:35)
Okay.
Jenny Beatty (1:07:40)
Sorry to test you on this, but I bring it up
I think she doesn’t say so again, but I believe Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly in autogyro in the world. I think that’s correct. And just bringing that up again, because Amelia doesn’t bring it up about herself. So we get to promote her even if she won’t.
Liz Booker (1:07:57)
Yeah, that would make sense. Yeah, okay, so I’m looking at it. You’re right, it looks like an airplane. has a, it’s the, the way that she’s describing how the controls work is kind of all about this disc overhead. And she’s describing it as it like, as like a circular wing, which isn’t really an accurate description. Yeah, so, but yeah, there’s no tail rotor. So there are definitely some differences.
Jacque Boyd (1:07:59)
Yeah.
Jenny Beatty (1:08:23)
Mm -hmm.
Liz Booker (1:08:25)
And you need forward flight, so you’re not going to hover this thing. apparently, having this rotor overhead is supposed to allow you to have slower approach and landing speeds. Again, maybe not sure how all that aerodynamics works.
Jenny Beatty (1:08:29)
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I don’t think it’s in the book, but she set an altitude record in the auto gyro, a world record. Yeah.
Liz Booker (1:08:51)
Yeah, no, she does talk about going up to a high altitude. Yeah, and not having oxygen, so.
Jenny Beatty (1:08:55)
It was a world record.
Yeah, at 18 ,000 feet.
Liz Booker (1:09:02)
But, and the other thing that she talks about too is sort of in the middle of this expedition that she had going across the country in this thing, she had a timeline and commitments that she wasn’t able to necessarily meet with the original aircraft because she crashed it. And then she does talk a little bit about sort of the disproportionate attention that is paid to women when they have an accident, something that we still deal with today.
Jacque Boyd (1:09:31)
right.
Liz Booker (1:09:32)
You know, if a woman makes a mistake, it’s like front page news and guys can do it all day long and it’s hardly gets mentioned. yeah, she says, speaking of plane accidents in general, I might add that women are often penalized by publicity for their every mishap. Any disproportionate breaks they get when they accomplish something are nullified in crash headlines. And so she is.
you know, has to endure that with this, the publicity over this crack up. She picks up another gyro though and finishes the tour and all as well. So, and that brings us to one of my favorite chapters, probably my favorite chapter. And Jenny, you get the honors, which is so appropriate because you just gave a lecture on women in aviation history like you do, but you did it at,
Ashkosh and I’m jealous that I wasn’t able to be there to see it. So tell us all about this chapter.
Jenny Beatty (1:10:35)
Yeah, so this chapter is called Women and Aviation. And I know both of you are going to chime in as well. So please jump in when you want to. But what’s wonderful about this chapter then and about the whole book is again, Amelia uses this opportunity, she has a platform, she has a microphone, and she uses it to promote women in women who are already doing amazing things in aviation, including working professionally.
So it opens with an interesting quote where she says she’s speaking at a woman’s club about the opportunities for women in commercial aviation. She says, painting the picture as best I could, which from the sound of it maybe was not a pretty picture. And directly afterwards, then the chairman remarks, well, you certainly spoiled my illusions. I thought girls could get any jobs they wanted in aviation just by asking.
And I found that so interesting. So here she’s saying that in 1932, and I think if Amelia Earhart were able to live to see today, she would be very disappointed that that is still the attitude of many people. That we literally, once we get our pilot ratings, that we can just walk in, flash our boobies, and get any job we want. Which is what we’re accused of sometimes. yeah, I mean, it’s… These are my own.
Liz Booker (1:11:40)
Right.
Jacque Boyd (1:11:42)
Right.
Okay.
Liz Booker (1:11:54)
My boobies would not have gotten me a job. I’m just here to say.
Jacque Boyd (1:11:57)
you
Jenny Beatty (1:11:59)
You might think that they’re fake and augmented, they are not. That’s my little joke. But you know, look what that does.
Jacque Boyd (1:12:06)
But even when she talks about women’s jobs in aviation, she doesn’t talk about just being a pilot. And I know just being a pilot will tick some people off, but she talks about the accompanying jobs, being in ticket sales, being in clerical work.
Jenny Beatty (1:12:19)
Yes.
Jacque Boyd (1:12:35)
And so it’s the whole genre of aviation, not just specifically in the cockpit, which I found interesting.
Jenny Beatty (1:12:48)
And what I want to add is she’s not just talking about opportunities for women, she’s talking about women doing this now, which I found fascinating. So she says that the number of women employed in aviation is small. She quotes the Bureau of Labor of saying it’s a ratio of one woman to 44 men and that many companies don’t have any women and that often the women are paid half as much as the men, but that she cites factory work.
Jacque Boyd (1:12:58)
Yes.
Jenny Beatty (1:13:17)
where they, women, it’s interesting, they’re using skills they learned from childhood where they’re sewing fabric for wings. But she mentions also welding, inspection of airplanes, construction of gas cells for dirgibles, manufacturing parachutes, which again, involves the cutting and sewing of fabric. And then many jobs in supporting an airline, almost exclusively clerical work.
She talks about women earning their living as pilots in every other realm that’s open to women at the time, which is selling airplane, ferrying airplanes, carrying passengers, instructing, product promotion, and transporting company executives. She says that women own and manage airports, run flight schools by themselves or with their husbands, and she knows of a woman who designs aircraft interiors for airliners.
She says two women examiners are on the medical staff that examine pilots for the Department of Commerce to get their pilot ratings. And she says two airlines employ women as hostesses on their large cabin planes. Now notice the word hostess at first, that’s what was their purpose was to make passengers comfortable and to offer beverage and food and later they became.
safety employees. I want to point out that today there are 245 ,000 flight attendants, of which 79 % are women. She mentions women working in managing travel bureaus, which we call travel agencies, which are a little bit less well known today. So yeah, every realm of aviation, including technical and manufacturing and mechanical type positions.
Liz Booker (1:15:08)
Well, and I see this as a very common theme in the outreach events that we do right now, like to just exposing young people. And most of the events that I go to are targeting young women and just sharing with with the audience that no matter what your interest is, there’s a place for you in aviation. know, everything from interior design to cooking to, you know, engineering to flying, all of the
The entire industry has opportunities for everyone.
Jacque Boyd (1:15:39)
Right.
Jenny Beatty (1:15:41)
Yeah. And then she does go into, you know, some of the prejudice and some of the barriers to women, which is that she says, for example, for flying, the best schools are the Army and the Navy, which are closed to women, but also that commercial flying flight schools don’t seem to welcome women students and seem to, she says, have little conscience about their adequate instruction.
But she goes on to say that it’s from childhood. It’s not only in schools where boys are funneled into woodworking and girls are funneled into cooking and sewing. She says boys would benefit from learning how to make pies and they might actually enjoy it. But she also goes on to say it starts in the home where boys and girls are raised differently. And I observed this, well, still today. I was raised in a home with only girls.
and I’ve talked to Jacque about some of the differences between she and I. She was the only girl in a family with three brothers. And we were raised, that environment, meaning that home environment, was a little bit different for her than it was for me. But she says emphatically, doesn’t mean that girls aren’t inherently, I’m sorry, I’m doing a double negative. She says that girls aren’t inherently,
non -mechanical. It’s just that they weren’t raised from a very young age working with mechanical things like Neta Snook was. She was a rarity, but most girls are not. She also then goes into how finances and prejudice about and the difference between how girls and boys are treated and women and men translates into difficulty in getting the training, especially pilot training that girls want.
they don’t earn as much money as boys and especially around airports, yet they pay the same price for flying lessons, she says. And then once they get their flying license, they have fewer ways to earn money as pilots. So needless to say, that affects their decision about whether they wanna be a professional pilot. Then she goes into aircraft and the way the aircraft themselves are designed in their construction.
that she particularly calls out the brakes, which the rudders and the brakes are on the floor, that are operated by the feet, and the starter, that they’re designed and located for masculine hands and feet, she says, that small women have discomfort with. And this continues to this day, literally this week. I’ve seen women post saying, I’m only four foot 11, can I learn to fly? I’m five foot tall, how can I do this?
And luckily what Amelia Earhart didn’t know then, which I can say now to people today, is that still some of our aircraft trainers, the very small airplanes, still are not really made for the whole spectrum of the average human being, but they are made instead designed for the average male human being, not all human beings. But the good news is that I say,
The larger the airplane, the more adjustable the seat. The large transport jets like airliners fly, those seats adjust up, down, back, forth, the back adjusts and the rudder pedals adjust. You don’t need a pillow anymore. But that’s what she says, just use pillows. And that’s still today, use pillows.
Liz Booker (1:19:10)
Yeah, Jenny, this is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart because I never had a problem with an aircraft until I retired and started flying civilian aircraft. And this is a point of contention between my glider instructor and me constantly. There’s a certain type of glider that we get into that I literally cannot have full right rudder deflection and also hold my arm on my knee and have my hand on the
on the handle of the control stick. I’m halfway down the control stick, therefore I have half the leverage that he does. And like we go round and round about this. I just don’t understand the ergonomics of these small aircraft at all. And it’s all these antics, all these antics of stuffing pillows everywhere. And I’m like, what? Can’t we just make this adjustable? What the hell? I had exactly right, yeah.
Jenny Beatty (1:19:53)
It wasn’t designed for you, Liz. They weren’t.
Well, time for a different glider. And this is my personal experience. I’m five foot three and my legs are kind of a normal length. So talking about women’s clothing sizes, I do not buy petite pants, but I’m a little bit shorter in the torso and I buy petite tops. by the way, so again, talking about big jet airliners, your eye level,
Liz Booker (1:20:09)
Mm
Jenny Beatty (1:20:30)
with regards to the instrument panel, but especially with regards to looking over the glare shield for landing, super critical and especially critical in low visibility landings, such as, you know, two, cat three landings where you have literally just a couple of seconds to spot that runway environment to continue the approach and land. So your seat has to be adjusted just so. And
Again, I don’t need pillows in a transport jet. any short person, male or female out there, if you’re shorter than normal or have a shorter torso, not to worry, the bigger airplane, you’re gonna be able to do it. But I just loved how she called this out. In this book in 1932,
Liz Booker (1:21:15)
Yeah, well, she called it out in 1932 and we still haven’t fixed it, but yeah, it’s… Yes.
Jenny Beatty (1:21:19)
Well, I will also say though, this also affected women in the military. So to jump ahead again, way beyond Amelia Earhart’s lifespan, but women were not allowed to be military pilots in the United States until 1973. And then even then limited in which aircraft types they could fly because of the combat exclusion that was lifted in 1994. But then even then, because of
the design of many fighter jets, for example, there is a smaller window or, you know, spectrum of height. Certainly men can be too tall to fly some of these jets. And it’s super critical because of the ejection seat. And in addition to reaching all the controls and switches and everything. But the good news is that because women in the military have been much more outspoken about this that we need
Liz Booker (1:22:05)
Mm -hmm.
Jenny Beatty (1:22:17)
not just helmets that fit our heads and flight suits and G -suits that fit our bodies, but we need these aircraft to be designed to also that we can fly them. And the good news is that I would say maybe you can correct me, Liz, but maybe in about the last 10 years, we have started to see that where new design fighter jets are designed to also include the scale of women pilots.
Liz Booker (1:22:43)
Well, I don’t have that personal experience with fighter jets. That’s not what I flew. I flew an H -65 Dauphine helicopter, which was one of the aircraft that was better suited for a smaller person, but also had everything adjustable in it. So yeah, I just didn’t have these problems when I was on active duty, thanks for whatever reason, whether it’s to the women who came before me or just the forward thinking of the military to make them more adjustable for broader cross -cut of the population.
I was fortunate and didn’t have to deal with those things.
[Time markers restart here due to connectivity issues during the discussion]
Jenny Beatty (00:01)
what’s interesting in this chapter is Amelia Earhart offers some data statistics about licensed women pilots in the United States. So as someone who does track numbers and data,
this was fascinating to me to have a little bit of information, which I presume she got from the Department of Commerce, which was the agency, governmental agency over pilots at that time, and aviation. And she says there were 472 licensed women pilots in the United States out of 17 ,226. Now, before I go on, this is in 1932, and that means that the United States had been licensing pilots for about eight years.
which means that there may be still plenty of people out there not licensed yet, but flying. Anyway, I did the math and that’s 2 .74 % of the pilots were women. So not that bad actually, considering we’re only to 7 % today, 90 years later. She also mentioned that there were 50 women holding the transport pilot license.
That is not a direct equivalent of our today’s airline transport pilot certificate, but it was the highest certificate available at that time. And she doesn’t really go into it, but I researched it elsewhere. She obtained the transport license, Amelia Hart did, in 1929 and was the fourth woman to do so in the United States.
Jacque Boyd (01:28)
you
Liz Booker (01:37)
wow, okay.
Jenny Beatty (01:39)
So very early on. What’s interesting is I remembered that Louise Thayton also claimed she was the fourth. I think then maybe Louise was the fifth. But again, and there was a little bit of jostling for position of who was first between Phoebe Omley and Ruth Nichols. So we’ll just kind of leave it at that for now. But she delineates there were five licensed women mechanics.
Liz Booker (01:59)
You
Jenny Beatty (02:07)
And she offers a contrast to some figures from 1929, only three years prior, that there were 12 licensed women pilots, she says, in January 1929. And then later in the year, there was a figure of seven women helped to transport license. So the numbers grew very quickly once licensing was put in place. So, you know, a little bit of great insult with some of those statistics.
And just to give you an idea of how we look today in the United States for certificated women pilots, I did mention total overall is 6 .84 % are women. And for the airline transport pilot certificate, the highest certificate you can earn, 5 .21 % are women. And what are the numbers?
that’s over 9 ,000 women hold, 9 ,071 women hold the airline transport pilot certificate. So that’s pretty cool. Mechanics, since she talks about five licensed mechanics, today data from the FAA, there 9 ,202 licensed women mechanics. They represent 2 .8 % of all mechanics.
a tiny minority, but their numbers have grown. So just to give you an idea. So that was fabulous. Anything else anyone wanted to talk about with the numbers? Yeah, I mean, I have to say, I mean, for me, it’s still discouraging that our numbers are tiny. mean, our numbers are growing, but the percentage, it’s been slow to grow. But it is like there’s a big surge happening now. I think we’re going to see the numbers growing ever bigger now.
Jacque Boyd (03:39)
You
Liz Booker (03:41)
Yeah, that’s great. Great perspective.
first.
Jenny Beatty (04:01)
and growing more quickly now. So that’s the good part. She also talks in this chapter then about the 99s, the Betsy Ross Corporation, which was, and another group called the Women’s Air Reserve of California. Both of those latter two organizations were formed to ready women and train women to act if needed in service of their country. So keep in mind this is between
the two world wars, obviously they didn’t know that a second world war was on the horizon much later. Again, this is 1932. So the drumbeat of war had not even begun in Europe yet. But women were mobilizing and preparing. And neither of those organizations were the ones that eventually became the WAFs or the WASPs. But the 99s
Liz Booker (04:52)
Mm
Jacque Boyd (04:52)
no.
Jenny Beatty (04:54)
thrived and was a source to draw from to find qualified women later. And all of that happened after Amelia Hart was lost. She starts to talk about naming individual women pilots of the day who I think she selected them because they are outstanding. They’re, they’re
setting records, they’re doing amazing flying. She mentions Viola Gentry, Bobby Trout, Dorothy Hester, Betty Hyler Gillies, which is interesting because Betty Hyler Gillies becomes very key person for the WASP later. She mentions Pancho Barnes, Ruth Law, Catherine Stinson, and there’s photographs of some of them. that’s all.
preview because we see individual highlights coming up later. Is there anything else people want to talk about here in this chapter before we go to the next chapter?
Liz Booker (05:48)
Yeah.
Jenny Beatty (05:53)
So the next chapter is called We Take to the Air. And she talks a little bit about the Women’s Air Derby of 1929, which later is best known as the Powder Puff Derby that was organized as the first cross -country race or derby for women pilots. And it launched from Santa Monica, California on August 18th, 1929, and did eight days later in Cleveland, Ohio.
Jacque Boyd (06:21)
Thank
Jenny Beatty (06:21)
She talks about the qualifications of the women, how they had to be very experienced pilots even to participate. And what I found interesting is she names the winner, Louise Thayden, and the second place winner, Gladys O’Donnell. And then she just kind of adds as a kind of an aside and me third. Again, what I saw in this book of her not dwelling on self -promotion.
Liz Booker (06:42)
Hehehe
Yeah.
Jenny Beatty (06:50)
But she came in third in the heavy class category in the air race. And she describes a little bit about some of the travails and problems that some of the air racers encountered, blanched noise, landing in a mesquite field to put out a fire and then just took off again. Others who got lost or ran out of gas and so on. But she does not mention some of the things that we have later found to be very troubling about the race, that there were suspicions.
Jacque Boyd (07:10)
Yeah.
Jenny Beatty (07:20)
of sabotage and also the death of one of the racers, Marvel Cross and possibly from carbon monoxide poisoning that caused her to crash. Not mentioned in the book. But she.
Jacque Boyd (07:35)
but I think she gave an overview, not a specific, and I don’t find fault with that.
Jenny Beatty (07:45)
Yeah, I’m just mentioning that there, you know, there’s more information and this book is meant to be promotional and give a positive light. And so I think that was, you know, in that spirit. Yeah. And she goes on to talk about the 1931 Air Race in Cleveland, where it’s first time men and women pilots are racing together in a cross country derby. And there’s separate prizes for men and women. She highlights winner.
Jacque Boyd (07:54)
Right.
Liz Booker (07:58)
Yeah, absolutely.
Jenny Beatty (08:12)
Phoebe Omley, who won $2 ,500 and a new car. She talks a little bit about, and I’m gonna mispronounce this, because I don’t speak French fluently, but the Fédération Aeronautique Internationale, or the FAI, which was established very early on, about 1907, as the world or international that governs aeronautical sporting events and records. And she talks about how there were first just
Liz Booker (08:15)
you
Jenny Beatty (08:39)
records and no separate category for women and that then eventually a separate division was formed. Well, I read somewhere else, she was a big advocate for making that happen. She doesn’t mention that in this book. And she outlines the different types of records and how those are done. between 1930 and 1935, she herself set seven.
Liz Booker (08:51)
Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting.
Jenny Beatty (09:03)
world records for women. But she doesn’t, again, she doesn’t really talk much about that, about herself here. And then she goes whole list of current records with details about who holds each record, aircraft and what it is and whether it’s for speed, for distance, for altitude. And she herself is listed twice in that short list of some speed records in her Lockheed Vega.
the Lackey Vega, don’t recall seeing when she bought it, but it is a much bigger single engine and mono wing airplane, but with a very powerful engine, 500 horsepower. she herself was a record holder at the time this book was coming out. And again, often these records were superseded within months, if not weeks, by others who was all challenging each other.
of amongst a group of about, I don’t know, 10 or 12 women, which is interesting, but know, good for all of them. And here she’s promoting them. And I have a quote that I wanted to read. She says, records as such may or may not be important, but at least the more of them women make, the more forcefully it is demonstrated that they can and do fly. Indirectly or directly, more opportunities for those who wish to enter the aviation world should be opened.
by such evidence. And then she goes at length to profile certain women Ruth Nichols, she spends about four pages talking about Ruth and Ruth’s life and her education, her training, her flying. she, Ruth is amazing. In fact, she’s somebody I hope we may be able to review her book in this series.
And then she talks at length about what she wears. I wanted to shout out to Jackie because she’s a woman who said she always is garbed in her favorite color, which happens to be purple, and owns a specially made purple leather flying suit and helmet. Yeah. And then she talks for several pages about Eleanor Smith. Eleanor Smith also has a memoir that maybe we’ll be able to read in this series.
Jacque Boyd (11:02)
Purple.
Liz Booker (11:09)
That’s awesome.
Jenny Beatty (11:19)
and talk about. Eleanor was younger than some of these other women, but no less accomplished. She just got into aviation with both feet, very, at a very young age and a very accomplished woman and competitor and record holder at that time and racer. And then there’s like two whole pages about all the different pilot attire that women wear, including her decision sometimes to wear, you know, civilian clothes.
But then because she had to look the part of a pilot, you know, maybe slap a helmet on her head before getting off out of the airplane. Because otherwise people didn’t believe she flew or just didn’t, she didn’t fit the image that they expected to see. And so she wanted to meet their expectation.
Liz Booker (12:00)
Thanks.
Well, she continues this sort of summary of women in aviation in the next chapter, some feminine flyers, which Jackie’s going to talk about. And again, like these parts for me were my favorite parts of the book where she’s kind of telling us about her contemporaries. Go ahead, Jackie.
Jacque Boyd (12:14)
Thank
right, both this chapter and the next one really do read like a history of women pilots. She is, she’s very supportive and the comments that are made really are very telling. She talks about Lindbergh and
both of them, she said, she said, it seems to me that the most significant characteristics of the Lindbergh is their habit of doing everything together, which, which I found kind of interesting. But, but then, then she also is, is very complimentary when she said Mrs. Lindbergh’s most dominant characteristic
Liz Booker (13:07)
Mm -hmm.
Jacque Boyd (13:19)
under her gentleness lies a fine courage to meet both physical and spiritual hazards with understanding. just such a lovely comment because there’s been so much comparison between her and Charles Lindbergh and was there a rivalry and whatever else and I thought that just
That was a lovely comment she saw below the surface. And I’m not going to go into specific women on this one, but it reads like a wonderful history.
And the next one, 20th Century Pioneers, it’s the same sort of thing. She talks about Catherine Wright. And it’s always, I always make jokes when people post things about the Wright brothers and I say yes, but it was the sister who was the driving force with the boys. So.
the end, Harriet Quimby, and again, the clothes. Of course, with a purple satin flight suit, you would kind of get people’s attention.
Ruth Law, she just, it’s a wonderful list and written in such a supportive way, bringing out the good things they did. And I thought this chapter was just fun in that regard.
Liz Booker (15:12)
So an interesting craft choice that she used again with the randomness of this book is that she sort of goes backward in the timeline here, right? She talks about her contemporary peers in aviation. She goes back a few years to, you mentioned Wright and Ruth Law, and then also the Stinson sisters. And then she goes, she plops this chapter in here about, called the first women aeronauts.
going even farther back in time to the late 1700s and 1800s when women were making their names in balloon flight, both for Napoleon and then we had, that was Madame Blanchard and the fun little back story on her getting the job with Napoleon was very interesting, which you guys can read about when you come to this book because I haven’t seen that somewhere else.
And then going on into the, I think, England area with Alyssa Garnerin and another lady, Mrs. Graham. So just a couple of early balloonists and what their role was in the history of aviation. And again, just sort of like not really in, I might’ve put the book in a different order if I were putting it together.
And then we jump from that. we go, we creep backwards in time on the women and we get all the way back to, know, the early balloonists. And then we jump ahead. Now we’re in future speculative land about what aviation will be, what it will become. And I mean, there are maybe a few far -fetched ideas in here, but frankly, like a lot of what she…
speculates was already sort of on the train and moving forward and comes true. And we get to see the results of those today.
then we go on to Across the Atlantic Solo, which is her, I name making achievement, I guess.
Jenny Beatty (17:18)
So, yeah, this chapter across the Atlantic solo, she admits right in the beginning that the manuscript for this entire book was already finished before she completed this transatlantic flight. And to be honest, the way this last chapter is written, it does feel a little bit hurried and tacked on. Because it does not go into the detail about the technical aspects of this flight quite as much.
Liz Booker (17:36)
Mm
Jacque Boyd (17:37)
you
Jenny Beatty (17:44)
as she did in describing the flood of the friendship that she participated in earlier. But it was added at the behest of her publisher and thank you for that because this was her crowning achievement at this point because she herself admitted and she herself felt, says, like a piece of baggage, a sack of potatoes that was carried across the Atlantic in 1928.
But what did she do here? She repeated Charles Lindbergh’s feat five years to the day after he did it. This is a big deal. So she talks about the preparation. was done in her red Lockheed Vega that I referred to earlier, she already had been flying around, was very experienced in. She’d been doing air racing in it. Talks a little bit about the preparations. what’s interesting is it,
It didn’t appear planned to exactly match the date of Charles Lindbergh’s flight because they were looking and looking and looking at the weather to find the most favorable time weather -wise for her to make the flight. And when it came up, it came up kind of quickly. She got a phone call when she was at the airport. They said, looks good. She ran home, changed into her flying togs, went back, flew from New York, made a couple of stops to end up in Harbor Grace, Newfoundland.
Jacque Boyd (19:07)
you
Jenny Beatty (19:08)
rested while her plane was undergoing its final preparations and fueling then departed on May 20th, 1932. And then she landed in Londonderry, Ireland the next morning, 13 and a half hours later. And what so much was different than the before. First of all, though, I want to take a little moment to refer back to something Jackie pointed out earlier on page
209, she just kind of puts in there something about, while my husband, always a good sport about my flying activities, was ready to back the plan with full enthusiasm. This is the first mention that she got married. She doesn’t even name him. So if you’ll indulge me, I’m gonna talk about her letter to her husband that she gave to him on the morning of their wedding.
Liz Booker (19:50)
Right. Right.
Jacque Boyd (19:52)
Right.
Liz Booker (20:01)
yeah, no, please do.
Jenny Beatty (20:04)
So if you didn’t already suspect that Amelia was a bit of a free thinker, an independent minded person, this letter may confirm it.
She called him GPP. She was known as AE. And this is a typewritten letter she handed to him the morning they got married. Dear GPP, there are some things which should be writ before we are married, things we’ve talked over before, most of them. You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby, chances in work, which mean the most to me.
I feel the move just now as foolish as anything I could do. I know there may be compensations, but have no heart to look ahead. On our life together, I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. If we can be honest, I think the difficulties which may arise
may be best avoided should you or I become interested deeply or in passing in anyone else. Please let us not interfere with the other’s work or play, nor let the world see our private joys or disagreements. In this connection, I may have to keep someplace where I can go to be myself now and again, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinement of even an attractive cage.
I must exact a cruel promise, and that is that you will let me go in one year if we find no happiness together. I will try to do my best in every way and give you that part of me you know and seem to want. A .E.
Jacque Boyd (22:02)
And see, they were married in 1931 and this book was written in 1932. So the, the union was still very, very young, but I did, I found it very interesting that she mentions him, no name, my husband, twice.
Liz Booker (22:03)
Very forward thinking.
Jenny Beatty (22:05)
Wow.
Yes.
Yes.
Jacque Boyd (22:32)
It was fascinating.
Jenny Beatty (22:34)
And for people who aren’t aware, he’d been the promoter for the Flight and the Friendship from 1928. He was married to someone else at that time and they offered their home to Amelia Hart to have privacy and a quiet place to write her first book, which was the 20 Hours 40 Minutes about that early flight. And then he was her promoter, but he and his wife got divorced and people sometimes may think that it was because of Amelia and yet,
Jacque Boyd (22:53)
Mm
Jenny Beatty (23:04)
his ex -wife turned around one month later and married somebody else. So maybe, maybe not. And apparently he proposed marriage to Amelia multiple times before she finally accepted. And you can see accepted with a lot of reservations and kind of conditions. yeah, so in a way after that little aside, he supported her in this effort to fly across the Atlantic
Again, lot of technical details are included. she launched and with a difference then being that now, five years later, she’s a much more experienced pilot. She’s done tons of cross -country flying. She’d done racing records, flown a real variety of aircraft, big aircraft, small ones. And she had studied blind flying or instrument flying, which she had to do to cross the Atlantic.
She says that about four hours out of Newfoundland, she noticed a small blue flame from a broken weld in the manifold and kept going. She says she wished she hadn’t seen it because then when night fell, it looked worse at night than in daylight.
Liz Booker (24:08)
I know.
Hahaha
That’s one way of dealing with that.
Jenny Beatty (24:16)
And…
And she says the last two hours of the flight were the worst. So now the exhaust manifold was vibrating. She switched fuel tanks and the fuel gauge began to leak. So rather than press on to Paris, France, which was the original destination planned to completely replicate what Charles Lindbergh did, she made a command decision to just land at the earliest opportunity and change your course.
for Ireland, made sure that she was going to go directly to Ireland, not miss it and end up over the North Sea. finally did look for railroad tracks, found a town, looked for an airport, circled, and she says, I succeeded in frightening all the cattle in the county, but landed in a beautiful, smooth, green pasture. This was a crowning achievement up till this point. She was the second and
only person for quite some time, only the second, to fly across the Atlantic solo. It proved that she wasn’t just, you know, a dilettante or, you know, someone who was in the right place at the right time and got famous for not doing anything. This really proved to herself and the world definitively that she was the equal of Charles Lindbergh because she duplicated his feat.
Jacque Boyd (25:41)
here.
Jenny Beatty (25:41)
I want to point out too that her beautiful red Vega airplane is in the National Air and Space Museum on the Washington Mall, downtown Washington, D .C. I encourage you to go see it.
Liz Booker (25:53)
Yeah, I just visited there a few weeks ago. Still in progress. Well, this is wonderful. just some takeaways for today’s readers. Particularly, think pilots will be fascinated by just getting this snapshot, this cross section of history. think this is, and it’s a quick read. mean, it’s 200 pages. You can read a chapter a day and it’s, or you can.
Jenny Beatty (25:58)
here.
Liz Booker (26:22)
read a chapter and put it down and pick it up six months later because it’s very random as we’ve talked about. It’s not like you’re gonna miss out on the threads of the story or the plot line with this one. But for that reason, I think it’s valuable just as a reference for us as pilots and for the general public too to just kind of see what the history of aviation looked like and how we got to every day sitting in the back of a Spirit Airlines aircraft and in those tiny seats and
Jacque Boyd (26:29)
You
Liz Booker (26:51)
paying $5 for our water. just quite the evolution from having being amazed that we could have tea in the back of an aircraft back then to where we are now. What other takeaways and then obviously all of the fun mentions of all the women’s history, which we is totally our jam, of course. What else do you ladies have in terms of like relevance today takeaways lessons?
Jacque Boyd (27:03)
Right.
think this is a wonderful precursor to read. And then my advice is take a look at the archives at Purdue, because when she did her teaching stint there, there are some absolutely phenomenal things. And if it emphasizes one thing for me,
her interest in promoting aviation for young people. Yes, with an emphasis on girls, but it’s genuine. It permeates her life. And, and I just, think this book is a wonderful little precursor to, it’s a stepping off point for a lot of other looks at who she was.
Jenny Beatty (28:16)
Yeah, I agree. And that’s why, like we said in the beginning, that everything she stood for, everything she valued, everything she wanted to say, I think is said in this book. She revealed only this much about her personal life, but she talked at length about all these other amazing people who were flying to promote them and to normalize it. And of course, laying out all the different…
things about aviation and flying that people might not know or understand. And she tries to explain that to everybody to again, bring it to into the mainstream and encourage people to get into aviation. Every once in a while I do see in passing somebody make a derisive comment about Amelia Earhart. How come she’s just famous for getting lost and dying?
which she did in 1937 during her around the world flight attempt with her navigator Fred Noonan. And this book really reminded me of how much she did accomplish a pilot. don’t just fly a single engineer plane across the Atlantic solo.
Jacque Boyd (29:29)
You
Jenny Beatty (29:30)
That doesn’t take just guts and luck, it also takes On top of all of her records and everything else. And by the way, only a couple years later, she also was the first pilot of any gender to fly solo from Hawaii to the mainland landing in Oakland in 1935. Again, these are not small achievements for any pilot.
Jacque Boyd (29:47)
Right.
Liz Booker (29:53)
I think one of the things that I want to say or that I take away from this is the example that she sets for us as women and as feminists and and and I mean you know men are feminists too so this goes out to them as well but just her taking her putting herself out there in the way that she did I think we like you the three of us probably surround ourselves
generally with other women and men who have the same goals in mind as we do. But when you think about the statistics and the very, very glacial change in the numbers in this just under 100 years since the 99 started, still need this. I will see some young ladies post on their social media, why do we keep talking about women?
you know, well, that you’re coming from a very privileged place if you feel that way that you can talk like that. We all and we all know other women who don’t want to have anything to do with it. Like they don’t want to they don’t want to, first of all, you know, highlight themselves as women. don’t they don’t for whatever reason, whether it’s the indoctrination into the adolescent boys locker room, which is how I describe the military aviation scene or.
Or maybe they just aren’t comfortable doing it. Well, find your courage ladies, because we still need to be out here promoting this field to future generations if we care about anything changing. And I do, I care, because I want aviation and the aircraft to be a more welcoming place for the women who can come behind me than it was for me. And so that’s why this is important to me.
Jacque Boyd (31:30)
Absolutely.
Jenny Beatty (31:42)
Yeah. So I do have a personal anecdote to share if we have time. So I’ve talked earlier in other videos about how both of my grandparents learned to fly. They were inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s flight and Amelia Earhart and learned to fly in 1930 in Yakima, Washington. And my grandmother, they were both a little bit older. my grandfather was around 50 and my grandmother 45 years old.
Liz Booker (31:46)
Please. Yeah.
Jenny Beatty (32:10)
and they ended up buying an airplane and flying around. Well, my grandmother met Amelia Earhart. So, my grandmother kept a scrapbook, which I have here, and unfortunately the clippings are kind of laid in one on top of another and many of them falling out, so not that easy to see, but this is.
a news story with a photograph of Amelia Earhart. The name of the newspaper is clipped away, but I think it’s from the Seattle Times. And the story is, so part of it’s in these articles and part of it’s in our personal family lore, the articles talk about, I’ll read one very small clipping here. And my grandmother’s name was Dora Skinner. And it’s a headline I think from a a local,
Jacque Boyd (32:44)
How cool.
Jenny Beatty (33:00)
news clipping in Yakima. Mrs. H .H. Skinner is planning soon to fly to Seattle, going by way of Portland so that she may be on hand to greet Amelia Earhart Putnam, the nation’s most distinguished woman aviator, when she arrives at Seattle to keep a lecture date. Mrs. Skinner has been honored with an invitation to be in the reception line at the meeting to honor Mrs. Putnam. goes on.
It also goes on and from our family lore, my grandmother planned to go to Portland. She did fly to Portland and then she planned to Amelia Earhart flying from Portland to Seattle. My grandmother in her own airplane and Amelia in her own or a different airplane. And that ultimately Amelia looked at the weather and declined to fly, took the train, but my grandmother flew to Seattle. So that’s part of the anecdote.
Jacque Boyd (33:50)
you
Liz Booker (33:54)
That’s great!
Jenny Beatty (33:57)
is in 1933. think you may have gotten the impression, or we’ve talked about it enough when talking about the book, that Amir Hart did a lot of promotion. She did a lot of traveling, speaking, know, chicken dinner after chicken dinner to all of these community groups, civic groups, aviation clubs, and everything else to promote aviation. So this was part of that.
the rest of the anecdote is that then my grandmother was in the receiving line for the Century Club talk that Amelia Earhart was giving in Seattle and that she had a limp sort of dead fish handshake, which didn’t impress my grandmother. And that then Amelia Earhart asked for a cotex menstrual pad, which did not, my grandmother did not look favorably upon that. And I’m like,
Liz Booker (34:36)
No.
Jenny Beatty (34:49)
this woman’s traveling and it’s a normal bodily function and women have normal needs, like why wouldn’t you ask for that if you needed that? You know, so those are the little family anecdotes I have.
Liz Booker (35:03)
Well, just starting with that letter, we know that she was a little bit unconventional in many more ways than one. yeah, you gotta get through. Yeah, help a sister out.
Jacque Boyd (35:10)
Yes.
Jenny Beatty (35:13)
just you have a need you ask to get it taken care of I mean it’s like I don’t know why to help a sister out yeah yeah so and today I am wearing my Amelia Earhart medal from the Amelia Earhart Memorial Scholarship Fund which was started by the 99s after she was lost to honor her and Jackie is a very longtime trustee of the fund
Liz Booker (35:23)
Well…
which
Yeah, which I was, yeah. So Jackie, just really quickly, just tell us about that.
Jacque Boyd (35:42)
Right? Well, 75th anniversary, I went to write an article about it. So I went through a lot of Betty Gilley’s paperwork and her presidential files for the 99s and found all the letters back and forth about what they should do to honor Amelia and
a scholarship, well, how are we going to fund it? How are we going to perpetuate it? And Betty Gillies wanted to have a portrait painted of her and hung in the new airport in Washington, D .C. And it was the back and forth was fascinating. And the women who worked on the scholarship came up with the same
basic investment philosophy that we’re, as a group of trustees, held to today. No portion gets used of the principle. It’s interest only. And at this stage of the game, we have about $8 million in the fund and tend to give around
Liz Booker (37:02)
well.
Jacque Boyd (37:04)
$800 ,000 every year.
Liz Booker (37:08)
Wow. Wow.
Jenny Beatty (37:08)
a year.
Jacque Boyd (37:09)
It’s, it is, yeah, well, absolutely, you know, and it’s, it is absolutely one of the most life -changing things in the world. I can speak to that. I would not literally be where I am if I wouldn’t have gotten that scholarship in 1979 for my master’s degree in aerospace education.
It’s, it is just such after reading the book and knowing the personalities of some of the other 99s who were involved in this, the scholarship was just the most perfect way to honor her. And it’s, it continues to do that. And every trustee I have ever known, there’s a little bit of a, no.
We can’t do that because the resolution says we can’t do that. The women in 1941 knew exactly who the women in 2024 were going to be. And it’s just, it’s a lovely memorial to her and basically completely membership endowed. So the members of the organization know how important it is and support it.
Jenny Beatty (38:39)
But it really is the epitome of the sensibility and drive and direction and values that Amelia Earhart had about promoting aviation to women in particular and getting them into aviation, getting them to be pilots, getting them to get ahead as pilots and to be professional pilots, not all of them. The scholarships are for any member, but these were all values that Amelia Earhart had. So it’s a big deal to us 99s.
Liz Booker (39:09)
Well, Jackie, thank you so much for the work that you do. I know that is a very time consuming responsibility. So thank you so much for preserving to you and all of your cohorts for preserving the legacy that they wanted to set for us. It’s incredible.
Jacque Boyd (39:25)
Thank you. Purely my pleasure.
Liz Booker (39:29)
Yeah, and it’s such a pleasure even for the smaller scholarships that the 99s and other organizations have created. It is an absolute honor to be able to sit on those panels and read the applications and be a part of lifting up the people coming behind us. that’s an absolute honor and joy. Well, this.
Jacque Boyd (39:49)
Absolutely.
Jenny Beatty (39:52)
And again, and again, back to the book. mean, that is personifies Amelia Earhart about promoting others rather than self promotion, which we’ll read about more of those women maybe in other books.
Liz Booker (39:57)
Absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, we’ve got plenty of self -promoting women in our midst and that’s okay too because we need them as well. They also represent some of them better than others. We will get to those ladies. Well, this has been wonderful and I just want to do a shout out to the listeners or if you’re watching. Hey, if you’ve read this book, tell us what you thought of it. I’d love to hear people’s impressions of this book and if you’ve read the other ones that we’ve read.
how it compares to you. You can drop me a note on my YouTube channel or anywhere on social media where you’re following me at Literary Aviatrix or jump in and find Jenny or Jackie wherever they are and let them know what you think of it. And that brings us to what we’re gonna be doing next. And this was, this required a little contemplation, not very much to be honest.
Jacque Boyd (41:01)
you
Liz Booker (41:01)
because I’m so excited about this new version of a book that had already come out. one of, so you’ve heard us drop all these names, both in today’s conversation and our last two, and you will notice something very homogenous about it, which is that they were all white ladies. But in this time, we also had a
wonderful pioneering aviatrix who was a black woman and Native American, Bessie Coleman. And Jackie is holding up the book in question. So we’re gonna divert a little bit from the format of only reading source material here so that we have the opportunity to discuss Bessie and her role in our collective history and what she means to us.
And I cannot think of a better way to do that than through this beautiful book that Carol wrote and published. I want to say in 2022, she was very excited about publishing the book on the 100th anniversary of Bessie getting her wings. And the only way she was going to be able to do that, especially with the COVID backups and things that were going on in publishing was to self publish.
which was a bold and a little bit risky maneuver, but she did it and the work stood on its own and now has been picked up to be traditionally published and was recently just released here in August with a beautiful new cover. And it’s just so exciting.
If you know Carol and you know her story, hers alone is inspiring. And then if when you get to hear the ties between her and Jenny, which we are going to save for next time, but you will understand why this is near and dear to this group of ladies. And we can’t wait to talk about that book. And so you can all join us by ordering a copy of Carol’s book, A Pair of Wings. We actually did this in the Aviatrix book.
Jacque Boyd (42:59)
Thank
Liz Booker (43:15)
Club after it came out. I want to say we did it in in 2023. And I have an interview with Carol, but this is the new version available to everybody. And hopefully she was just on national public radio. So hopefully this book is reaching an incredibly broad audience, which it should.
Jenny Beatty (43:36)
A pair of wings by Carol Hobson.
Liz Booker (43:38)
of Paravane by Carole Hobson. So that’s what we have to look forward to next time when we get together. Thank you ladies as always for your insights and for taking the time to go through these books with me.
Jenny Beatty (43:52)
This is so enjoyable. just enjoy spending time with the two of you and with our wonderful women who went before us. So thank you so much, Liz and Jackie.
